


Behind Blue Eyes

by Marta



Category: Lord of the Rings (2001 2002 2003), Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Character Study, Gap Filler, Gen, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-03-08
Updated: 2009-03-08
Packaged: 2017-10-15 16:35:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/162747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marta/pseuds/Marta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Late one night after the Ring was destroyed, Bilbo cannot sleep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Behind Blue Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> _Pleasure and pain, therefore, are not only necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence. […] [T]he rules of architecture require, that the top of a pillar shou'd be more slender than its base, and that because such a figure conveys to us the idea of security, which is pleasant; whereas the contrary form gives us the apprehension of danger, which is uneasy." (from David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature)_

Bilbo blinked in the inky darkness of the late night. "Aldarion was a mariner…" someone sang loudly, just outside his window. He tilted his head toward the sound, to catch it with his good ear.  _Two_  someones, he decided. If not for that he'd have tried to go back to sleep or at least let the elves have their fun – for indeed, they all had much to celebrate – but twin voices singing decidedly off-key most likely meant more than normal high spirits.

He wouldn't let on that they'd woke them, wouldn't give them the pleasure, but he knew he couldn't sleep now. He was fully awake, and all that racket was enough to keep even a half-deaf hobbit from slipping back into dreams. So Bilbo fetched his dressing-robe from the hook behind the washbasin and made his way to the kitchens. A cup of warm milk might be just the thing to help him get back toward bed.

He could hardly explain why he was so careful to be quiet. His young cousins were likely already asleep, but they wouldn't be woken by one hobbit's bare feet if they'd slept through all that song. And he doubted the Twins were the only elves enjoying the night air; Bilbo was sure half the House was singing somewhere on the grounds. As for Gandalf, he would be deep in his cups with Elrond by now, or –

Bilbo stopped cold in his tracks. He'd glanced into the Hall of Fire almost without thinking about it, and had been quite startled by a pair of blue eyes staring back at him out of the darkness.  _Praps ye sits here and chats with it a bitsy, my preciousss. It likes riddles, praps it does, does it…"_  But that had been a voice out of another time, long ago under dank mountains. And Gollum was dead besides, that had been explained to him well enough though it hardly seemed real.

Eärendil peaked out from behind some cloud, his pure white light falling through a window far above so it fell on a hand. Nimble fingers twisted anxiously around a stump of a finger as if it was twisting a ring. The Ring, Bilbo corrected himself, and it surprised him that he needed correcting. "Frodo?" he called out into the darkness.

Those blue eyes grew wider in shock.  _What iss he, my preciouss? What has it got in its hands?_  Bilbo knew there was no one else in the room, that the one who might speak with such suspicion and fear was gone for good – yet those blue eyes gleaming in the dark seemed so familiar. It was as if he felt the gritty mud between his toes, heard the webbed hands sliding through the underground pond as Gollum had crept nearer. 

Bilbo had to bite down on his lip so the pain would anchor him to the present. Those blue eyes had once shone with wonder at stories about Elves, he had to remind himself. Those fingers that had grasped at lost talismans had once held charcoal sticks, shading the shadows in sketches of life in Bag End from his overstuffed chair by the fire. Bilbo had to remember that.

"I'll be right back," Bilbo said, ducking into the hall for a torch. He'd set it in the sconce along the wall so its light flooded through the room. And there was his Frodo. His cheeks were a little too bony still, and his hair was a bit matted with sweat, but it was still his boy. Those eyes, fitted in their proper face, held a promise of beauty once more. Eerie, that, how they might look so like the eyes of another; but that had only been a trick of the dark, surely…

He walked over to Frodo and kissed him on his brow through the sweat-slicked hair, and gave his shoulders a light squeeze. "Come on, lad, come with me." Frodo did not fight him, rising to his feet and following Bilbo silently across the room. "A snack will set you aright, and then we'll go off to bed, and morning will come before you know it."

Yet Bilbo felt a bit unnerved. He wondered whose eyes he'd see in the mirror, when next he looked.

**Author's Note:**

> The remembered bits of dialogue are from "Riddles in the Dark," _The Hobbit_.
> 
> The title is taken from the Who's song "Behind Blue Eyes. ([Listen](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9-3RZkzpwM).) While this vignette is bookverse, it is inspired by the movieverse similarity between [Frodo's](http://www.framecaplib.com/lotrlib/html/episodes/images/rotk/rotk0758.htm) and [Gollum's](http://www.framecaplib.com/lotrlib/html/episodes/images/ttt/ttt0062.htm) eyes.


End file.
